Golf is a sport activity in continuous and sustained growth, with 50,000,000 amateur players around the world, according to 2014 statistics.
The traditional golf round consists of 18 holes, each of which vary in difficulty and length. The number of strokes in each round is divided between those called “fairway strokes”, which are made along the fairway until you get to the green where the hole is located; and those called “putting strokes”, which are strokes made in the green. The best scores are achieved by reducing the total number of strokes per round, and putting strokes are key when trying to accomplish this. Nevertheless, a bad putting performance is very common not only in amateur players but also in some professional players.
Amateur golfers do not tend to take putting lessons. Those areas in Golf Clubs and Driving Ranges where one can practice putting are not usually very busy, as opposed to those areas where general golf practice takes place.
It is striking that even though a bad putting performance is the cause of most amateur players' frustrations and the reason behind poor final scores, little attention is paid to putting practice as opposed to the other aspects of the game.
Putting practice without an adequate technique or a repetitive and consistent mechanism can turn out to be tedious, boring and frustrating, which definitely makes players spend more time focusing on other aspects of the game where improvement can be perceived through practice.
Notwithstanding the aforementioned, for a while innovators have been trying to improve players' performances through the use of their inventions. Most of them aim to improve golf players' swing, while some of them aim to solve the same problem this invention aims to solve, the putting stroke.
One of the first known related art devices, English patent GB175197A, dates back to 1921 and consists of a mechanical device which aims to teach the right way to make a putting stroke. A heavy and hard-to-assemble device, whose objective is to “guide” the golf club in order to achieve a successful stroke. The suggested solution is unfeasible and discouraging for any player.
A group of known related art documents suggests using a type of small or even portable external guide to help the player achieve his goal. Some of those external guides are Spanish documents ES 1 078 831 U, English patent GB 1 385 004, U.S. Pat. No. 3,844,569 and U.S. Pat. No. 3,857,570, U.S. Pat. No. 4,927,153, U.S. Pat. No. 4,962,933 and U.S. Pat. No. 5,180,168, publication US 2009118028 A1, publication PCT WO2007/009052A1, and Japanese publication JPH022206776, among others.
All these documents aim to solve the problem through external guides in the shape of rulers, set squares, mats or other irregular forms with assembled elements that provide a guide so that the player can execute the correct stroke. These suggested solutions vary from a simple straight ruler, arch or triangular structure to more technologically developed devices. Nonetheless, the disadvantage all these inventions have is that, in all cases, the player has to carry big devices with many pieces that he later has to assemble in situ, which ends up discouraging players from using them.
Other inventions that propose portable guides combined with external guides are, for example, the inventions detailed in U.S. publications US 2009/181787 A1 and US 2011/300962 A1. All these inventions propose flat and straight guides that the player wears in order to limit his movements and therefore learn the correct way to execute a stroke. Publication '787 consists of a device that locks the player's arms in a U shaped form, together with a system of rulers that need to be placed on the ground. Publication '962 is a T shaped guide that aligns the player's shoulders and is connected to the end of the golf club. Both inventions have the same defects that were detailed in the analysis of the previous documents.
Other types of related art that also aim to limit the player's movements are those devices that need to be worn in other parts of the body, such as the elbow (in order to improve swing performance), like in U.S. Pat. No. 5,344,152; the wrist of one hand and the shoulder of the opposite arm creating a bow (also to improve swing performance), like in U.S. Pat. No. 3,740,005; and the player's forearm and elbow, like in Korean publication KR20130100474A. All these devices limit the player's movements, making him uncomfortable to the point that the devices become non-user-friendly. This quickly ends up making the player abandon putting practice.
Finally, another group of inventions focuses on the use of harnesses or belts that together with attached auxiliary devices help correct defective positions or help guide the player into the right shooting direction. These inventions include Japanese publications JP2004229754 and JP2005278830; U.S. patents that describe types of harnesses with elastics or types of belts with ropes staked to the ground or with devices that attach to the golf club, like documents U.S. Pat. No. 5,308,074; U.S. Pat. No. 6,832,960 B2; U.S. Pat. No. 7,731,597 B1; US 2012/0034988 A1; US 2013/0267334 A1 and publication PCT WO 2003/080194A1, which also reveals a chest harness with a removable device that can be attached to the end of the golf club so that the player's movements are limited when he practices his swing. This group of inventions shows structures that not only are tedious to carry and assemble, but also extremely uncomfortable to use, which in the end leads to the player abandoning them.
The purpose of this invention is to provide a portable device for the practice of the putting stroke that is light, small, comfortable, easy to carry and without pieces that need to be assembled before its use.
It is also the purpose of this invention to provide a portable device for the practice of the putting stroke that can be adapted to both right-handed and left-handed players, and with a low production cost.